The Most Important Thing I’ve Learned From Industrial Design

Hi friends,

Today is National Industrial Design Day.

For the non-designers in the audience, according to the Industrial Designers Society of America, “Industrial Design (ID) is the professional practice of designing products, devices, objects and services used by millions of people around the world every day.”

While I have some misgivings about the relatability of the professional title, it is pretty cool we have a day.

On National Industrial Design Day, I’m reflecting on the most important thing ID has taught me:

How to take things apart and put them back together.

ID involves a lot of widely differing skillsets, from sketching to prototyping to 3D modeling to manufacturing knowledge. But this one is the most important by far.

If you talk to any designer about how they got into the field, you’ll probably hear some version of, “When I was a kid, I liked to take things apart and try to put them back together”. The field of Industrial Design is largely this curiosity put into professional practice.

We try to understand how things work and make them better for people.

I think most people move through the world with a fairly surface-level understanding of things. They know how to drive a car, but maybe not how a car works. Meaning, how does a car actually convert liquid dinosaurs into forward movement.

I’m not a car person and I honestly only have a cursory understanding of how a car works. But I’m confident that with this skill that ID has equipped me with, I could take one apart and given enough time, understand how it all works together and suggest ways to make it better.

The skill of tearing something down to its constituent pieces, understanding how each of them work together to form a greater whole, and then putting it back together (perhaps in a better way), is one that has applications far beyond design.

It teaches you that any problem is solvable. There is no challenge that can’t be broken down into understandable chunks that can be improved upon.

ID is by no means the only way to develop or apply this skill. I recently watched a fascinating YouTube video of a food photographer deconstructing a natural lighting scenario and artfully recreating it with studio lights. Same skill, different application.

I put this thinking into practice on a daily basis, from solving design problems, to managing projects, to tinkering with ramen recipes.

So thank you, Industrial Design, for teaching me one of the most valuable skills for life.

Anson

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